Last week my sweet friend Laurie Cockerell escorted me to the town of Paradise, Texas, to do some research for the book I’m working on about George “Machine Gun” Kelly and his wife Kathryn Thorne. One of the stops made was to Kelly’s grave. While searching for Kelly’s final resting place we met a man wandering through the cemetery taking pictures. After helping us locate Kelly’s grave marker he asked us we were aware that Elvis was alive and shared that the singer and actor was preaching sermons at a church in Georgia. He went on to inform us that JFK and Princes Diana were also alive and serving pie at a local eatery. We smiled politely and nodded before telling the curious man that we’d love to stay and chat, but we needed to get back to the planet earth.
I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised to find that this misguided fellow has his own Youtube channel where he talks about the famous men and women the public believes are dead but are living and working at places like Chick-fil-A and Boot Barn. The followers of this silly man are staggering. More than thirty thousand individuals tune in regularly to hear what he has to say! I couldn’t help thinking after watching a few moments of the “show” that it seems like the only people who are quiet and don’t film themselves saying such crazy things are serial killers. We live in a nauseatingly confessional society, but it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when you wouldn’t dream of telling a person you just met that you were an alcoholic. Unless, of course, you met the person because you had driven your car into their swimming pool.
The thing about the entertainment media’s brand of voyeurism is, we’re so easily bored that if somebody wants to keep our attention, they must continually supersize the freak value. What I can’t fathom are the people who auction off their privacy on the open market. You can go on-line now and watch mutants and cybergeeks who record every nanosecond of their lives – every snore, every burp, every restraining order filed against them by Oprah or Taylor Swift. It all raises the philosophical question: how can you broadcast your life when you don’t have a life?
What’s really bothering me is that in retrospect, I should have stayed at the cemetery long enough to ask the man if George Kelly was still alive. I’m kicking myself now thinking that I could have driven to Home Depot and chatted personally with the gangster about his misdeeds.
